TOTAL RECALL

Fact, fiction and folly fuse enigmatically in Studio Job’s latest creation, a 2,000 sq m visual narrative celebrating the Dutch city of Delft

- JOHN WEICH

Some artists treat fabrication as a means to an end; Job Smeets is not one of them. He likes to get his hands dirty. His work is loaded with conceptual metaphors, but he speaks most passionately about the tactility of majolica, the plasticity of bronze or a wall tapestry’s interlaced warp threads. Since founding Studio Job in 1998, the Belgian-born designer has sculpted and moulded a language of his own that hovers somewhere between ornate sculpture and pop-influenced design, folkloric and kitsch. His work has both fans and critics, but no one has ever questioned his material prowess or the sincerity of his craftsmanship.

We visited Studio Job weeks before the opening of House of Delft – at 2,000 sq m, the largest commission of Smeets’ career. When completed, it will also be the largest artwork in the Netherlands, surpassing the 1,680 sq m Panorama of Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag in The Hague. House of Delft encompasses three galleries in a Frits van Dongen-designed building of the same name. Like Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelung, it is a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) comprising interconnected forms, including 120,000 tin-glazed tiles, a 40m tapestry and a 7m-high stained-glass window. The work's technical complexity and fantastical imagery make it feel like a contemporary reboot of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Like Wagner's operatic cycle and Bosch’s triptych, House of Delft is a grandiose vision that takes multiple viewings to unravel. Fortunately, visitors can decode House of Delft’s dense symbolism 24 hours a day through enormous ground-floor glass panes. The artwork is a gift to the city of Delft by billionaire native son Chris Oomen.

Arguably, preparation for